23% of Bihar’s ‘completed’ PMAY-G houses had no roof: What CAG findings reveal

Replying to a question in the Bihar Assembly on February 11, 2026, Rural Development Minister Shravan Kumar said that against a target of 12.19 lakh houses for 2024-25 and 2025-26, only 2.96 lakh had been completed, while 9.23 lakh were still under construction. 

As many as 72,492 beneficiaries had not received their first instalment. The minister said Bihar had sought an extension from the Centre after failing to establish the required SNA.

On August 20, 2026, Union Rural Development Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan announced the approval of 11,18,937 new PMAY-G houses for Bihar, with an allocation of ₹13,427 crore, at a state-level PMAY programme in Patna.

But the new announcement raises a bigger question: why has ₹1.20 lakh in government assistance so often failed to produce a completed house?

₹1.20 lakh is not the entire housing package

Under PMAY-G, Bihar is classified as a plain-area state and receives ₹1.20 lakh per house as core housing assistance.

The programme also provides ₹12,000 for a toilet through convergence with Swachh Bharat Mission-Gramin and wage support for prescribed person-days of unskilled labour through the rural employment guarantee framework. Basic amenities such as water, electricity and LPG are also intended to come through convergence with other schemes. So the effective package is larger than ₹1.20 lakh.

But there is a missing number in the public data: how much does an average Bihar beneficiary actually spend from their own pocket to complete a PMAY-G house?

Construction costs vary by location, material prices, labour availability and how much of the work a household can undertake itself.

Sometimes the money itself is late

The Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG)’s report on Ayushman Bharat–Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana and Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana-Gramin, tabled in the Bihar Assembly on February 26, 2026, examined PMAY-G implementation in the state from 2017-18 to 2023-24.

That audit found delays even in releasing the first installment.

In a sample of 1,454 beneficiaries, 1,248 received the first installment late. The audit attributed delays to issues including beneficiary-data mismatches, deaths, delayed verification, PFMS rejections and bank mergers.

The CAG also found 830 beneficiaries who had been sanctioned houses but had not received their first instalment as of February 6, 2025.

That creates a basic problem: a beneficiary cannot start construction with an instalment that has not arrived.

And Bihar’s fund-management problem predates the February 2026 SNA episode.

The CAG found that transfers of Central-share funds into Bihar’s SNA had been delayed by 14 to 154 days during the audit period, creating an interest liability of ₹71.08 crore for the state.

The lesson is straightforward: sanctioning money at the Centre does not mean the money has reached the household.

Beneficiaries leaving houses unfinished

The other side of the story is equally important. In March 2025, Bihar’s Rural Development Minister told the Assembly that notices had been issued to around 1.5 lakh PMAY-G beneficiaries who had received assistance but had not completed their houses.

The department issued 82,441 white notices and 67,733 red notices, while certificate cases were initiated against 19,495 beneficiaries.

So there are two distinct failure points:

Money reaches the beneficiary, but construction does not progress or the house cannot progress because the money itself is delayed.

Both ultimately appear as an unfinished house in the government’s pipeline.

Scale of the backlog

The Ministry of Rural Development’s July 21, 2026 PIB release provides a broader picture.

For the five-year period from 2021-22 to 2025-26, Bihar had 22,10,788 houses sanctioned, of which 15,12,269 had been completed and 6,98,519 remained under construction.

That means only about 68.4% of the sanctioned houses in this recent cohort had been completed.

Though, the cumulative picture is better. As of July 16, Bihar had been allocated 50,12,752 houses, of which 49,09,838 were sanctioned and 41,89,147 completed. That means about 7.21 lakh sanctioned houses were still incomplete.

So it means the older houses have had more time to reach completion.

Records do not always match the ground

PMAY-G uses AwaasSoft, the Rural Development Ministry’s digital platform for tracking beneficiary and construction progress. The CAG physically verified 1,454 houses in sampled districts. Of the 1,324 houses recorded as completed on AwaasSoft, 306, or 23% still had roof casting pending.

Only 961 of the houses marked complete were actually found complete during physical verification.

The audit also found that 541 of those 961 completed houses did not have toilets.

The monitoring problems extended to geo-tagging.

In 155 cases, photographs uploaded to AwaasSoft showed a house different from the one physically verified.

In another 55 cases, house locations were geo-tagged at distant places outside the gram panchayat, district and even outside Bihar.

These findings do not mean every incomplete house is wrongly recorded. They do show that a digital “completed” status cannot substitute for physical verification.

Bihar’s social-audit gap adds another layer

The CAG also found that only 3,648 of the 13,328 required social audits, i.e. 27% were conducted in nine of the 10 sampled districts during 2017-18 to 2023-24.

The audit also found 390 beneficiaries who had received their first instalment but had not started construction even after 34 to 93 months.

Bihar sought more money per house

At a meeting with Union Rural Development Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan on January 3, 2025, rural development ministers from more than a dozen states sought an increase in PMAY-G assistance to ₹2 lakh-₹2.25 lakh, from the existing ₹1.20 lakh-₹1.30 lakh range. Bihar was among the states supporting the demand.

The real test is completion, not sanction

Bihar’s latest housing allocation is substantial. But its experience shows why the headline sanction number can be misleading.

The state enters this new phase with:

• 9.23 lakh houses still under construction from the 2024-25 and 2025-26 target;
• delayed instalments and documented fund-routing problems;
• beneficiaries who have received money but not started construction;
• and CAG findings showing gaps between digital records and physical houses.

The question for the new 11.19 lakh houses is therefore not simply how many will be sanctioned.

It is how many will receive installments on time, reach construction milestones, receive the promised converged amenities and ultimately stand completed on the ground.

For Bihar, the ₹13,427-crore housing push will only become a success story when the government’s sanction data and the physical reality in its villages tell the same story.

For PMAY-G, the sanction is the promise. The finished, verified house is the outcome.